In the Select Insel became actually involved with his watching of a red-haired girl he raved of as “die Rothaarige”—her thighs were peculiarly long and agile. “She’s a bit of a Lesbian,” he sighed, filled with some inverted reminiscence of antagonism.
“Look here, Insel — you’re crazy about that girl— and all you do is sit around x-raying her — Get up— go and speak to her—”
“She’d be too expensive—”
“Colossus never had any money.”
“Colossus was beautiful—”
“What about it? You’re looking unearthly. She might get a thrill out of it — try — forget the expense— I’ll back you — Go along.”
But Insel, subsiding in his inexplicable negativism, refused to stir.
“Listen,” I admonished him, “all this is really unwholesome — and sitting boxed up in an attic adoring that canvas Irma all day — you’ll become impotent—”
In a burst of the extravagantly sophisticated laughter I had heard him emit once before, “I only wish I could,” he assured me.
“What a subject,” I reflected, “the virility of the starving man.” But the Select was undergoing change — opening out to aqueous space in darkling shadows of metallic liquidity as in the vision of the Lutetia, that strangely etiolate phallic ghost floated like the stem of a water lily. Before it had terminated in a battlement akin to that of the castle among chessmen; now it was topped with a little crown of thorns.
Through the chill shimmer of this unreal deep— the hallucinatory blue the Coupole had painted on the backs of dreary houses as a setting for its garden cafe — the blue I would wish the sky to be showed us another dawn.
“Look.”
“There should,” said Insel, extremely worried, “be a lighted lamppost there.”
“There is,” I reassured him, “lower your head — see it was cut off by the blind.”
This was the last of the two or three nights I spent with Insel in Montparnasse.
We crossed again to the Dôme to have breakfast. Sitting beside him, I could see a man in white armor conduct a ballet. Serried rows of mustard pots drew up before him, their porcelain bellies burdened with amber. They moved to and fro as with a wooden spatula he lifted off their stale crust of night, filled and leveled them, and set each one down to be armed with a clean bone spoon.
“Woher kommt diese halbe Mücke?” Insel grumbled, insanely hacking with his knife at a tiny aeronaut shade circling an inviolate orbit, because he could not make out “Where this half a fly comes from.” I knew it was only a baby fly, yet all the same it loomed above him hugely as an insectile cherubim cut off from its entrails in a like unanatomical constipation to Insel’s monsters.
The rest of the day till two o’clock when Insel, as usual, it seemed must “appear in court,” we spent in an incredibly concentrated and somehow heartrending arithmetic, reckoning up whether Insel, out of the three thousand francs loaned on his picture, could possibly afford a new pair of boots. We had already decided he must have a warm overcoat when, although it was not particularly chilly, little muscles in the side of Insel’s nose, self-animated, leapt up and shivered. “You are freezing,” I discovered in startled concern, scanning his fragile flimsy features.
“I hardly feel it — I am used to it,” said Insel, dolefully heroic. “It is only discomforting to those who are with me.”
But I teased him a bit when we said good-bye, alluding to a lunch with the Alpha when to our mutual hilarity we had made out how only two hours after leaving my studio after that utter collapse, he had stumbled into hers.
“He looked ghastly,” she told me. “He had not eaten, he had not slept — his heart had ceased to beat!”
Insel, whom I had seen so sly, had been vainly hoping to get his beefsteak fresher.
“How on earth,” I inquired, “do you compose your Totenkopf in so short a time? Pretending to Mlle Alpha—”
“Why,” Insel answered pat, with the queerest inflection of intimacy, as if I were some virgin he had raped, “I thought you would not like me to tell her I had been with you.”
“It’s marvellous,” I assured him in amused admiration, “your knack of dying on doorsteps. At will! At any moment! You might make a good thing out of it. Perhaps you do. Insel, I believe you put lots of money in the bank!”
I could feel a distinct change in his aural temperature, but I was laughing too much to pay attention. An impression of a sacred stronghold “blowing up,” that shadow-tower of iron rag the clochard-deity Insel had built, like an ant of his wasted tissue, was so very, very faint — In view of America, I was constantly on the hop — busy with buyers of furniture — packers littering the place with straw.
Arriving for some appointment, I was unprepared to run into an Uneasiness in the vicinity of my home, although it remained closely sealed in its shutters and nothing by day ever went in or came out. Les concierges, their aides and cronies, the grocers at the corner, all were under the apprehension of the place being haunted. Even Bebelle, whom I came across in the street, had, on going there to clean, turned and fled.
“Madame,” she said in a hushed warning, “in there it is dark at noon. Terrible clothes have clotted on the floor — Never before have I seen what was lying on the bed.”
Insel at last must have been evicted and at some unknown hour crept into the flat.
24
SOMEONE WAS LIVING THERE.
On my throwing open a window, he hooked his arm round his neck, rubbing the mastoid. “I have lain here for two whole days,” he said, ferocious with dignity. “I have a stiff neck.”
A hard-eyed, low class German, his very existence an insolence, wearing a shirt from a cheap shop — Insel must have thrown himself away with his old black sweater above which his former face had risen like a worn, pocked moon.
Unquestionably, I had cured him. Here was the “normal” man. An Insel unobsessed. Someone “replacing himself,” his mesmeric, melodic voice exchanged for a hostile creak.
This culminating phase of my eerie experience — Insel’s residence—remains confused, as I was busy directing packers.
Cavilling and bilious, whenever he caught sight of me he hardly refrained from spitting. Our relative positions entirely reversed, I had become for him a strange specimen, to whose slightest gesture he pinned an attention like that of a vindictive psychiatrist.
“Ha-ha!” he neighed irately, “I find little ‘still life’ in this flat. It would surely be of the greatest interest to Freud.”
We had, in our “timeless conversation,” with Insel’s concurrence in my “wonderful ideas,” superseded Freud. I must always have known he had never the slightest idea of what I was talking about — yet only now did this fact appear as negatory.
The still life that intrigued him was a pattern of a “detail” to be strewn about the surface of clear lamp shades. Through equidistant holes punched in a crystalline square, I had carefully urged in extension, a still celluloid coil of the color that Schiaparelli has since called shocking pink. Made to be worn round pigeon’s ankles for identification, I had picked it up in the Bon Marché.
Out of this harmless even pretty object an ignorant bully had constructed for me, according to his own conceptions, a libido threaded with some viciousness impossible to construe.
I was astounded.
It would be only natural that my jerky vibrational currents (which behave so much like a “poltergeist” that things when I touch them are apt to vanish, adding a superhuman difficulty to my work) should impinge on Insel’s abnormal precision with the force of a shock, although in the hallucinatory dimension it was this very extreme of antithesis that must set up the telepathic, televisionary machinery of our reciprocity.